Pages

Wednesday, October 10, 2018

Is It Offensive to Quote Churchill? | Good Morning Britain

Professor Kehinde Andrews says that Churchill starved 3 million Indians to death, but Piers Morgan, and everyone else, do not take any notice of this and just go on to say all the good things Churchill did. Piers Morgan then says to Professor Kehinde Andrews, that if he hates Britain so much then why does he live here, and Professor Kehinde Andrews says, because Britain wrecked all the other countries in the world? And so it goes on like this. It's quite funny. There's a lot of banter here and it's difficult to follow at times, but the atmosphere remains congenial. Professor Kehinde Andrews is a likeable and friendly guy who makes this clip very entertaining.

Astronaut Scott Kelly has been forced to apologise for praising Winston Churchill on twitter as people branded Churchill as racist and said he responsible for millions of deaths worldwide. James Whale and Professor Kehinde Andrews debate whether or not it is offensive to quote the words of Churchill.

3 comments:

Criticising Churchill because he was a racist is absurd because racism was normal in his day. Maynard Keynes was also an out and out racist. So what do we do: ignore the lessons set out in his "General Thoery"?

Moreover, what's wrong with racism? Racism, according to my Oxford Dictionary is, among other things the idea that some races are better than others. Now there are professional psychologists who claim some races have higher IQs than others. So what do we do: arrest those psychologists?

It's quite possible that psychologists make mistakes. However my basic point is that the idea that different races have different IQs is perfectly reasonable, ergo there is nothing wrong with racism, at least in the above Oxford Dictionary sense.

As to why it is reasonable to think different races may have different IQs, it would be a bit odd if the brains of population groups that have been separated for tens of thousands of years had not developed in slightly different ways. After there are significant differences in average height, body mass, susceptability to different diseases and so on.